Ivory Search Premium

One search box for the whole site becomes a problem the moment there are two things inside

It is the limitation nobody sees until they suffer it, and the one this plugin solves better than any other.

WordPress has one search box, which searches everything. And that works while your site is one thing. The moment you have a shop and also a blog, or a documentation section, or a member directory, that single search box starts returning absurd mixtures: you search for a product and three blog posts come up first.

What is needed is the obvious thing WordPress does not provide: a different search box in each place. The shop's one searching products, the documentation's one searching manuals, the blog's one searching articles. Each in its section, each with its own rules.

Ivory Search improves the standard search box and allows creating custom search forms.

What it does

• Several search forms, each with its own configuration.
• Control over what gets searched in each form: post types, categories, sections.
• Improvement of WordPress's default search.
• Easy to configure, without the complexity of reindexing the whole site.

The cases where this is exactly what you need

A shop with a blog. The shop's search box only searches products, and the blog's only articles. It is the most frequent case and the one that removes most frustration: nobody hunting for a product wants to read an article first.

Documentation or a knowledge base. Its own search box inside the help section, ignoring the rest of the site, turns a folder of manuals into something usable.

A private area. A search box for members that only looks at content they have access to, without showing titles of things they cannot open.

Excluding noise. Being able to leave legal pages, thank you pages, attachments and old content out of search improves results more than any algorithm.

Where its limit sits, said plainly

Worth knowing so you do not buy expecting what it is not.

This plugin is good at deciding where it searches and what gets included. It is lighter to get running than the large alternatives precisely because of that.

What it does not do to the same depth is change how results get ordered. If your problem is that the correct result comes seventh because the term appears in passing elsewhere, that needs an engine allowing different weight per field, and that is a different product category.

The practical rule: if your problem is scope, this is more than good enough. If your problem is relevance, you need something else.

Requirements

It needs WordPress. When building several forms it is worth being clear beforehand what each one searches, because that is the decision that makes it work.

Alternatives in the catalogue

If your problem is relevance and you need one field to weigh more than another, or to search inside custom fields and documents, SearchWP replaces the whole engine and is built for that.

If your problem is exclusively the shop, there are specialist search plugins that do that particular job better: Advanced Woo Search is the catalogue's most used and FiboSearch Pro stands out on enormous catalogues, both with suggestions while typing.

If the problem is vocabulary, people typing different words from yours, Term Synonyms solves exactly that.

And if what is missing is not searching but narrowing by several criteria at once over many records, that is filtering and takes another road: the FacetWP and Elementor integration or, in a shop, YITH Ajax Product Filter.

Frequently asked questions

Can I have several different search boxes?
Yes, and it is its main feature: one per section, each with its own rules.

Can I exclude content from search?
Yes, and it usually improves results more than any algorithm tweak.

Does it change the order of results?
Not in depth. Weighting by field needs a plugin that replaces the engine.

Does it search inside custom fields?
Not its main territory. For that there are search engines with deep indexing.

Is it suitable for a shop?
It works, although for WooCommerce alone there are specialist search boxes with suggestions while typing.

When is it the right option?
When your problem is the scope of the search rather than the relevance of the results.